The key feature of Distance Haze is that, like quite a few good current sf books, it is genuine literature. That is quite an impressive achievement, since the storyline itself is a string of silly pranks, one tasty absurdity mounted on another. But Nasir’s near-science postulate is based on genuine recent work in cognitive neuroscience. Reputable scientists do claim to have located a “god module” in a portion of specialized temporal lobe circuitry that lights up preferentially during religious experiences. Lesions near this region can precipitate “hyper-religiosity,” a clinical disorder. It is not a stretch that certain genome sequences encode these modules, and might in future be switched on or off in the brain of a developing infant. Might a person mature from childhood without any intrinsic, evolved bent for faith? If so, would he or she be cruelly impaired, hurled into inconsolable Sartrean nausea and meaninglessness—or, rather, liberated from programmed illusion to an unprecedented degree? Could such a transformation be worked on the brain of an adult? It is a topic that has been explored by Greg Egan, the master of this sort of speculation. But Nasir writes more joyously and hurtingly than Egan.
Nothing much in the novel is as it seems. Certain mystical or dreamlike episodes might be delusions fostered by grief, thwarted pain and ambition and love, and perhaps concealed machineries. It is possible that Nasir himself did not know ahead of time where the narrative would come to rest, his several alternative superposed trajectories careening together to create a kind of mutually constructing and self-deconstructing curve drawn sparkling inside the Cloud Chamber of Unknowing. He comes close to making it work successfully because he is ready to put his character through comic pain:
...he had reasoned that out there somewhere must be a girl beautiful and young and educated that would love him, blonde with silken skin who unclothed was all catlike languor and fire…. They sat in a quaint cafe and talked about Emily Brontë and Shakespeare, Doyne Farmer and God, complexity and love and the structure of the universe, their eyes locked together, until he could feel the earth turning about him, the blood rushing in his veins, time bringing the sun to light the flowers in the window boxes, the rain to water them....
But where to go? A singles bar? The idea both repelled and tantalized him. He holding a drink and sliding through air-conditioned dimness toward a half-seen hairdo in the smoke, which would probably conceal a drunk dental hygienist or secretary who, smelling his fear and uncertainty, would sneer at him in her stupid vocabulary and bad grammar. He didn’t know where any singles bars were, and anyway even if he managed to pick someone up he would have nowhere to take her but his smelly, disheveled apartment.
The fatuous but heartbreakingly elegiac, the callously cruel but self-laceratingly candid—none of this is remotely new to the mainstream, but it remains rare in an sf novel. What you might not find in most “literary” novels is Nasir’s easy confidence with the rhetoric of scientists in full flight, notably in a concerted scene with a Francis Crick-like genetics Nobelist, Dr. Raymond Hall:
“Do you think scientists are immune from the lure, the seduction of higher meaning?...Science began as a religious exercise: it was believed that the study of nature would reveal the hand of the Creator and hints as to His divine plan. It was never suspected that no sign of a God would ever be found at all, that deep, rigorous study of nature over hundreds of years using incredibly sophisticated techniques would turn up not one iota of evidence—not one, anywhere—that God exists.... This isn’t some whim or premature conclusion or philosophical sleight of hand. It is the result of five hundred years of concentrated study by thousands of the best minds of every generation... all of which has been gone over again and again by people of all backgrounds and biases, but most of whom, the vast majority of whom would much rather have concluded that there was a higher meaning. If there had been one there to find, we would have found it, we would have fallen on our knees before it, we to whom meaning, pattern is everything.”
What counts here is Nasir’s scrupulous annotation of a worldview rarely seen in the mainstream, yet often just assumed as background in sf. When the epiphanies tumble down, as they inevitably do (most blatantly, in the exact middle of the book), their sweetness is only slightly cloying, since we know in our bones that awful reverses lurk deep within such narratives of redemption and illumination. The question is, which redemption will be unmasked as villainous error: the probing scientific meliorism with its inevitable thalidomide-like risks, or the Zennish post-illusioned elevation of the ordinary? Nasir’s answers are thought-provoking. One might have expected this fine novel to be a strong runner for the Philip K. Dick award (as was Nasir’s earlier novel, Tower of Dreams in 1999), or the Campbell Memorial award. It was not even a nominee.
64
Alastair Reynolds
Revelation Space trilogy (2000)
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS is an astronomer by profession and a writer by grace of nature and vocational diligence. He came to the field’s attention by publishing a number of attention-grabbing short stories in the UK magazine Interzone and elsewhere, then leaped into a three-book deal with one of the UK’s best publishers, Gollancz. These initial three books would all turn out to be set in the same future continuity, and eventually the saga would be extended by two others, so far. This future history would take its name from the first book, Revelation Space, a confident postmodern space opera offering intergalactic adventures aplenty, despite a little ambitious bloat.
In the 2500s, our galaxy is colonized to a small degree by humans of various clades. Alien sentience is surprisingly absent, save for two minor races. The Jugglers are ocean-locked creatures without our kind of tech, and the Shrouders are enigmas hidden away in deadly twisted segments of the continuum—the “revelation space” of the title, where hallucinations and epiphanies precede almost-certain death. Scattered clues abound as to the past history of our galaxy, and the conjectured scenario is not pleasant. Millions of years ago the Dawn War incurred mass extinctions of various sapients, and a few humans suspect that whatever ancient mechanisms killed these races still lie in wait.
Into this landscape, Reynolds inserts one professional soldier-assassin, Ana Khouri; one merciless starship commander, Ilia Volyova (also female, the de facto trendy gender nowadays for tough spacers); and one rogue scion of a famous family, Dan Sylveste, whose Shrouder-altered mind seems to hold secrets inaccessible even to himself.
Reynolds uses a three-track narrative to acquaint us with these main characters and a slew of supporting actors.
In the first segment, we watch Sylveste at work on the planet Resurgam, conducting an archaeological dig. Unsuspected by him, his skills and knowledge are desired by someone else. That person is Volyova, who is battling a plague onboard her ship, the Nostalgia for Infinity. Meanwhile, Khouri is resident in the vast urban space known as Chasm City. She is tasked with infiltrating the Nostalgia for Infinity as it seeks Sylveste, and then eventually killing the man.
The narrative tracks fuse to two, as Khouri is insinuated aboard Volyova’s ship, and then to one, as the Nostalgia picks up Sylveste as well. The denouement on an artificial planet circling a neutron star certainly rewards the careful buildup, which has been peppered already with sub-climaxes galore.
Reynolds proffers many gifts to his readers, among which are primarily speculative fertility and descriptive clarity. Here for example is his vivid explanation behind the explosion of an ancient weapon:
Spacetime had been punctured, penetrated at the quantum level, releasing a minuscule glint of Planck energy. Minuscule, that is, compared with the normally seething energies in the spacetime foam. But beyond normal confinement that negligible release had been like a nuke going off next door. Spacetime had instantly healed itself, knitting back together before any real damage was done, leaving only a few surplus monopoles, low-mass quantum black holes and other anomalous/exotic particles as evidence that anything untoward had happened.
Employing such no-nonsense yet evocative prose, Reynolds still manages to p
roduce some real poetry. And his choice to eschew FTL travel or FTL communications lends a deeper majesty to his slow empires.
Reynolds, born in 1966, represents a generational shift in the writing of space opera. Raised on Star Wars, Reynolds and his cohort take the bones of the mature subgenre for granted, relying automatically on the painfully accumulated encrusted tropes of their forebears as mere scaffolding onto which they can graft twenty-first-century speculative concepts, postmodern sensibilities and multicultural characters, and some paradoxically retro blood and thunder. Their sense of wonder derives not from the mere skeletal notion of empires stretching across light-years and the tech that supports them, but from the flesh of daily living that enfolds the milieu.
Reynolds’s unerring ability to please a new generation of readers—and attract veteran fans as well—his reliability in crafting lived-in and challenging galactic adventures would be rewarded in 2009, when he inked a contract garnering him one million UK pounds for his next ten books. Doc Smith, pioneer of the form, was undoubtedly smiling down incredulously from his heavenly coign of vantage.
65
Adam Roberts
Salt (2000)
THE DEBUT of a startlingly original voice in our field, especially a voice that sounds a grimmer, more classically tragic note than some of our more frothily entertaining bards, is always an occasion for celebration. Adam Roberts’s first novel, Salt, was one such joyous eruption of note.
Roberts appeared out of the blue, unheralded by shorter fiction, a mode which to the present he has mostly eschewed. But he would not remain unknown for long, given his polymathic accomplishments. Issuing at least one book per year since his first, Roberts has branched out into literary parody and critical exegesis, even producing a book-length study, The History of Science Fiction. But it is with his novels that he has secured his sterling reputation. All his novels are unique, each starting with some consensus-shattering conceit packed with both emotional and intellectual substance. Although some critics such as Paul Kincaid have found his work arid and overly recomplicated, Roberts is arguably the essence of what an sf writer must be: visionary, brave, shocking, lateral-thinking.
Because what arrives unheralded and disruptively must always be compared with what has gone before, despite any injustices to all parties involved, consider some of the sensations of reading Roberts’s first novel, all unawares.
It’s like reading Crowley’s “In Blue” as rewritten by Barry Malzberg. It’s like reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as rewritten by Norman Spinrad, or her The Left Hand of Darkness reworked by Ken McLeod (Entry 53). Or Robinson’s Red Mars (Entry 29) altered by Mark Geston. Or Eric Frank Russell’s Wasp redone by Stanislaw Lem. Yes, that strange and enjoyable.
A sublight colonization party—twelve ships tethered to a tame comet—is headed toward a distant world that seems from past probes to be capable of supporting life. One ship, the Senaar, is crewed and captained by adherents of a rigidly hierarchical political system. Another ship, the Als, contains anarchists. Our narrators, in alternating sections, are Barlei, a general, and Petja, a typical libertarian type. The conflicts that arise between these men and their followers en route, before they enter hibernation for three decades of travel, are merely a sampling of the trouble that will follow on Salt, their new world. Struggling with the inhospitable environment, the colonists nonetheless are fairly well off and secure enough to have time for mischief. Misunderstandings between the settlements named after the founding ships soon blossom into internecine war.
Roberts portrays both his dominating landscape—a world of chlorine-tainted seas and harsh radiation, yet weirdly beautiful—and his people astonishingly well. Lots of the uneasy laughter in this tragicomic book stems from the disjunction between viewpoints. Seeing the same events through the radically different minds of Barlei and Petja, the reader is astonished that any two humans could be so incongruent. Or perhaps the moral we are meant to take away is that any agreement at all between any two humans is the real miracle.
But the core event that limns the full extent of these clashing worldviews is the arrival of a Sennarian diplomat, Rhoda Titus, in Als. Petja’s take on her mission, and her reaction to his indifference, segues from hilariously comic to shatteringly tragic, once battle intervenes. And it’s a surprise, yet somehow right, that Rhoda gets the final words in the book.
Roberts’s real genius is in making neither Barlei nor Petja the absolute villain. Both are obtuse at time, both perceptive. Each honors his own values, and simply cannot fathom an alternate paradigm. Perhaps Barlei is a bit more self-serving and deceitful, but Petja’s frigid honesty and lack of connection serves him and his community just as ill as Barlei’s glory-seeking sternness. And neither man “wins” in the end.
Salt stands today as a marker laid down in a gamble by a neophyte author: can a career be made under present marketplace circumstances without pandering to fans, repeating oneself, or dumbing down sf’s essential mode of estrangement? No wise reader should be willing to bet against the seasoned veteran Roberts has become, in light of his superlative record.
66
Karl Schroeder
Ventus (2001)
KARL SCHROEDER holds the distinction of being one of the few writers of sf actually trained in “designing the future,” having recently acquired a Master’s degree in Strategic Foresight and Innovation, that discipline once called “futurism.” But even before passing that academic milestone, he proved speculatively puissant indeed, in the homegrown, un-diploma’d manner of other masters of the genre, offering readers a brilliantly recomplicated future straight out the gate with his debut solo novel Ventus, whose Heisenberg-hazy December/January publication date straddled the century’s divide, earning it the lead slot in this volume’s 21st-century selections.
In many ways, Ventus is the quintessential novel of “conceptual breakthrough,” a classic mode of sf that can be relied upon to provide many delightful frissons for reader and protagonist alike. A narrative venue, either somewhat mysterious to native dweller and reader alike, or, alternatively, mistakenly deemed fully plumbed and comprehended, is revealed to possess hidden depths, or to exist in undetected relations to a larger sphere. The textbook case is a generation starship carrying nescient and degenerate human cargo. In the instance of the planet Ventus, inhabited by our hero, Jordan Mason, both conditions are true, and the existential explosion causes Jordan—and the novel’s appreciative audience—to experience that mind-widening ontological leap beloved of the sub-genre.
Ventus was terraformed a thousand years in the past by artificially intelligent nanotech entities doing mankind’s bidding. But upon the arrival of the first human settlers, these “Winds” inexplicably went a tad berserk, and began a program of destroying any technological artifacts. The result, after a few centuries of mecha-Luddite pogrom, was to plunge the colonists into ignorance of galactic affairs and into a state of civilization on the level of Earth’s 1700s. Steam power is barely known and tolerated by the Winds, who are thought by Ventusites to be malicious supernatural creatures.
Into this settled society come two interstellar emissaries, operating undercover: Calandria May—much like a Banksian Culture operative (Entry 17)—and Axel Chan, Han Solo-ish rogue. They are on the trail of a construct named Armiger, a semi-detached extension, an avatar, of a rogue AI dubbed “3340.” Although the hostile 3340 has been put down elsewhere, its scattered seeds such as Armiger still threaten our species.
Jordan Mason is their lead to Armiger’s whereabouts, thanks to a nanotech probe from Armiger that he bears in his sensorium. But Calandria does not reckon with the fact that the humans on Ventus have their own dynastic schemes, and that some of them might actually be able to communicate with the powerful, enigmatic Winds. When Calandria’s starship is destroyed and she and Axel are stranded, the fun is just beginning. Especially when Armiger joins forces with dynamic Queen Galas, one of the few natives who understands the Winds for what they truly are.
Schroeder has a stylistic and thematic romp across his blood and thunder adventure, by operating on two levels: those of fantasy/myth and of Hard Sf. While the whole scenario is impeccably buttressed by cutting-edge science, much of the action comes across like fantasy. The untenanted perfect ancient mansions where machine servitors await are straight out of the uncanny fairytales by Grimm or Andersen. Armiger’s corpse-like condition and his stumbling escape through nighted forests reads like the plight of a zombie or Golem. There are duels and castles galore. As Calandria observes, something about Ventus inspires ancient feelings of the supernatural.
Likewise, when Axel tries telling Jordan about the war against 3340, Jordan replies that it sounds like pure legend. This flip-flop illusion—vase or profiles?—is the perfect sf trope of cultural relativity. Schroeder is, to some degree, heir to John Campbell’s worldview and school of storytelling. One can envision this book as being written by a ramped-up, hip, 21st-century H. Beam Piper or Randall Garrett. And indeed, one of Campbell’s late-period discoveries, Vernor Vinge, attempted something similar to this in his Tatja Grimm’s World. Schroeder even indulges in a little of the ironic, winking juxtaposition of mythic and scientific that Roger Zelazny employed in Lord of Light and elsewhere.
One of Schroeder’s most salient and intriguing riffs concerns the concept of “thalience.” This is the notion of networked intelligence at the fine-grained levels, attainable through a nanotech insemination of computing power. Here’s how Jordan comes to conceive of this revelation, yet another conceptual breakthrough:
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Page 23
